Sure, if this is the concern i can completely understand it. When people use it they should put in the same mentality as with any centralized service and never trust it, no matter what.

This is something not unique to chivo and many people are still using centralized services for various practical reasons. But we also gotta look at the unique situation El Salvador was in, with 70% of the population being unbanked and not having access to easy financial services at all. Now he introduced a state banking like app, that gives people access to fiat, bitcoin main layer and lightning payments for people that had nothing beforehand. Then there’s practical reasons that make it necessary to convert between all these and make them interoperable. And people here are complaining about gambling and centralisation for using money and building infrastructure to introduce these services, what do they expect politicians to do? What more practical solutions could a central entity have offered in this situation, as they can’t even build something decentralized? Put emotions to the side and this is a huge opportunity he gave to people, who didn’t have access to anything beforehand. This is actually their opportunity to even use decentralized services easily in the first hand, as they now have access to the main layer and lightning, even if chivo wouldn’t use these in their daily operations. It’s just another side network.

People can only use decentralized services themselves, this a burden the state can’t take from them. It’s also important to have realistic expectations and look at how/ why things are being used. The state will do its job, and people need to do their own. Not your keys, not your coins. If we’re concerned, we should maybe teach El Salvadorians how to store their Bitcoin safely/ run nodes and not use centralized services when they don’t need to. Chivo might still offer utility, in the same way bank accounts and central exchanges still offer some kind of utility and we’re using one of the two too, without complaining to our politicians that these services are centralized, what else should they be? Should they start lying to us and just make it seem like it’s decentralized, when it can never be, to make us feel better?

I completely agree, like i said, people shouldn’t get too comfortable with any centralized service and we should try to teach them now, to prevent further damages. The criticism on the state specifically are unjustified tho now, as no one before this government had made any considerable attempts at banking this huge part of the population, and the app is there to solve this task. It’s easy to bash anything without context, like some people here do again and again.

The simple question in the end is, would El Salvador have been better off without making Bitcoin legal tender and introducing Chivo? If yes, how and why weren’t they better off before? Constructive proposals are the only thing that could help them.

Why should it? Haven't there been sources they rely on for the generation of IGR before the adoption of bitcoin? Moreover if they fefided so then i can tell you it really worth it because bitcoin is a good source of investment, go online and check the list of cryptocurrency investors worldwide and see that they all have their investments made on bitcoin.


If that's your own personal assumption then fine, but the reality is that Nayib Bukele is working out different means to help established the country into full independency yet people like you aren't getting it, if am to burst you with this could you believe that "It is better to invest on bitcoin that is running dip because sooner the season will end and bull run will begin which is certain than investing on fiat currency that got overcomed by inflation and left one with no choice over time".


This gives it the more reason why Nayib Bukele should invest more on bitcoin because when the recession eventually landed, many countries will be affected but i can assure you that thise with bitcoin adoption and investments will scale through without been affected, by now i expect you to understand that Fiat and bitcoin does not work thesame lane nor perform thesame role in the economy, of which bitcoin is an improvement to that which fiat has left undone.


Unrest from where? Let me tell you if recession is to come, El-Savador isn't among the first countries to be affected, while the solution to that from happening is bitcoin.

Well, I glanced at your profile aylabadia05, and I see that you have been registered on the forum since mid 2017, and maybe I can infer from that about your learning about bitcoin and wanting to learn about bitcoin since that time (so right around 5 years of learning, no?)  

I started in bitcoin in late 2013, so I am a bit more than 8.5 years of learning about bitcoin, yet I also had a decent amount of living back ground that included personal investing prior to my getting into bitcoin, too.

Each of us comes to bitcoin with our own set of experiences, and sure if we are younger, then we might not even have had any exposure to bitcoin at all, but bitcoin continues to grown in the world, and so more and more people are learning about bitcoin and learning about different ways that bitcoin might be helpful to their lives on an individual level and so those kinds of learnings have been moving into the spheres of various kinds of institutions and even countries too with the El Salvador example that only goes back a little more than a year for when El Salvador (as a country) announced that it had a plan to get into bitcoin more BIGGEDly by passing laws to make it legal tender and other developments that are associated with that (including but not limited to that El Salvador would spend some of its resources to buy bitcoin, too ... for its treasuries and also for some balancing of funds purposes too.. I don't claim to know the various ways that El Salvador is merely HODLing the bitcoin it bought or using some of that bitcoin in working ways to facilitate some exchanges that might end up going back and forth to dollars or stable coins).

In some sense your summary of what bitcoin is, and your rendition of its "main purpose" comes off as overly-simplified, even though you are providing an intro to bitcoin link, and sure if you are attempting to figure out some of the differences between bitcoin value and bitcoin price, then surely you are correct with any implication that you were making that people might not even be sure about whether bitcoin is overvalued or undervalued at its current price, and those assessments of value versus price can sometimes motivate people in terms of whether they believe that it would be fruitful for them to get involved in bitcoin through purchasing bitcoin or maybe trying to earn bitcoin.. or on the other hand to sell or to purchase items with whatever bitcoin that they have if they believe that the value of bitcoin is less than the current price.

For the past 8.5 years that I have been learning about bitcoin, I have also attempted to incorporate bitcoin into my life in terms of allocating a portion of my investment portfolio into bitcoin, and then considering that bitcoin has various kinds of value and potentially increases some of my options in terms of how I have attempted to balance my various bitcoin strategies and practices and ongoing learning more about bitcoin at the same time - while sharing some of the learnings in the forum or even getting some of my information and ideas about bitcoin through the forum.

Part of my point remains that you are not necessarily wrong in your attempted basic description of what is bitcoin aylabadia05, but your seeming reliance on getting a description from a basic introductory links gives me some sense that you may well have not been spending a lot of time building experiences around bitcoin in the last 5 years or so, which could possibly help you with your own attempts to summarize what bitcoin is from your perspective and how that might relate to topics being discussed in this thread (and surely every thread on the forum may well have deviance from its topic, but it seems to be the responsibility of members to attempt to stay on topic or to bring their deviations back to the topic of the thread, if possible).


Currently, I hold right around 10% of my various BTC value on various third-party platforms/exchanges, and there were times that I held quite a bit more through various third-parties, and when I first got into bitcoin, I had not realized the various ways that it would be better to hold some of the value separately, and I even had some value on blockchain.com (blockchain.info back then), and had not completely appreciated that I had generated my first wallet backup through them and kept that in my e-mail, and then I had some subsequent back up seeds that were in e-mails that I had ended up archiving - but still not even clear about the extent that some of those back ups had been vulnerable, too (even though in theory the third-party was not really holding those keys).

Surely there is a bit of a gradient in terms of how any of us might choose to hold our keys and/or to keep them with third parties, and there are trade-offs and even some governments and/or institutions may have requirements to hold their keys through 3rd parties which can create vulnerabilities, too.

I have frequently asserted to newbie bitcoin adopters that they should not be too preoccupied in the very beginning of their starting to get exposure to bitcoin in terms of learning how to hold and manage their own keys, even though it should be an aspiration for each of us, and especially the more value that we put into bitcoin....

Let's say for example, a BTC HODLer in 2015 was not very worried about having had bought $2,500 worth of bitcoin in 2015.. (which would have been about 10 BTC for $250 each), so that HODLer was not keeping track of his her bitcoin security and how his keys were held, but then pretty soon in early to mid 2017, those BTC have become worth way more than $25k and then currently they are worth $250k, and they had gone up to $690k in November 2021.. , so sometimes there could end up being justification to start to pay way more attention to how much value is in the bitcoin based on changes in the price, and there might be some needs to rethink security and even rethink the various locations that the coins (private keys) are held.  Are all the coins in one place or are they in different spots?  Are the coins connected to each other in terms of privacy?  Various kinds of concerns can develop if either the BTC changes in price or if more value is invested into BTC.

There also can be questions about what storage locations are available and how frequently is it expected to use those coins and are there advantages to attempting to have some kind of multi-sig set up or how much work and learning is needed to run a node for even better potential for privacy.  The various tools and options continue to develop, and some of the need to learn more might have to do with how much exposure is going into bitcoin , and surely some normie newbies into bitcoin in El Salvador might start by just various basics in using various lighting wallets.. but then advance into feeling some needs to keep some coins in cold storage and/or as long term savings - even if they might have economic circumstance that ONLY allow them to save $10 per week or even less sometimes.


We seem to be somewhat on the same page here, tadamichi, and in that regard, you and I are acknowledging the existence of both centralized and non-centralized services while at the same time recognizing and appreciating that some of these are more tied to directly being pegged to bitcoin than others, so for sure there are needs to start somewhere - including that some advantages are likely coming to a large number of people in El Salvador - even if some of the various services might only be tangentially connected to bitcoin - while at the same time, just having more options and opportunities increases the potentiality that El Salvadoreans are going to be able to learn more about bitcoin and maybe even to be able to move some of their value into completely self-custodian options.. but they have to start somewhere in their process of learning about bitcoin and learning about bitcoin-related services and even learning about various differences and risks that might associated with each in terms of privacy or convenience and other possible trade-off factors that they might consider to be potentially relevant to their circumstances and/or whether they benefit in the present or might they also consider possible future benefits too.


I don't have any problem with throwing out various criticisms, but of course, in this thread we get naysayers who harp upon the negative, so many of them do not really have any intention to engage in any kind of meaningful discussion regarding what is really happening in El Salvador in terms of various kinds of systems and options that are being built and surely seem to be good investments from a bitcoiner perspective... including potentially being very empowering to a lot of El Salvadoreans.. even if it may well take a decent amount of time for them to learn about bitcoin and some of them might not want to learn, too.


Yep.. surely a lot of innovation has happened and becomes possible by the sheer creation of space for private sector to attempt to develop in El Salvador and the El Salvador government putting resources and focus in the direction of various kinds of bitcoin investments and developments too.

The state is attempting to be bitcoin-friendly.. so sure the state could do the opposite, too.. and create burdens  on the citizens in regards to bitcoin, but they are not.. and in some sense we are lucky that Bukele is not distracted into shitcoins and exerting a large number of controls in regards to how people can or cannot use bitcoin.. Sure some additional burdens could develop later - but the way Bukele seems to have a pretty decent grasp of what is bitcoin probably would not happen under Bukele .. and it will be interesting to see if there is a transition of the leadership and then how will the bitcoin matter be handled during and after such a transition in the leadership.


It seems space is present for those kinds of teaching to already be happening and ongoing in El Salvador, and even some of the government promotion of bitcoin seems to be ok. with the development and promotion of various bitcoin services that are not necessarily connected to the services that the El Salvador govt is providing, such as the Chivo wallet.



It does make sense that a government wallet would retain several centralized aspects, and yeah maybe like a traditional bank that is not compulsory but just is there in case people want to use it or find some convenience in using it.


Well, so far, there do not seem to be very many jurisdictions that even come close to El Salvador in terms of both bitcoin-friendliness and trying to embrace a kind of comprehensive approach in terms of covering a whole country, and El Salvador even seems to have a decent sized population.

In this thread, we have been getting a lot of seemingly vacuous proclamations to bash on El Salvador, yet at the same time, we are still waiting to see if any other countries might go down some kind of a similar path in order that we might be able to engage in a bit more comparing and contrasting - and again, I am not opposed to criticizing various ways that maybe improvements could be made or if their might be some problematic aspects in terms of how bitcoin is being implemented in El Salvador - and surely more and more information is coming available with the passage of time, so there might also sometimes be criticisms that El Salvador is not sufficiently sharing some of its bitcoin related information, and how much they decide to share is discretionary too.

By the way, I am not even going to get upset about arm-chair criticisms, even though it does seem that El Salvador has been attracting quite a few more bright and innovative folks who are challenged in both their wanting to see the building of bitcoin infrastructure and systems, and to share information in public ways, and a decent number of those kinds of people and companies are going to El Salvador temporarily or even more permanently to invest, investigate and innovate in regards to these kinds of matters, and a decent amount of that information is going to end up getting shared in wider ways because even if there are some possible proprietary ways that bitcoin can be developed, there are also a lot of open source aspects in the various ways that bitcoin continues to be developed, built and information shared.


I doubt that we need to entertain those kinds of stupid frameworks.  Of course, there are dumb fucks in this thread and in other parts of the forum who propagate those kinds of mostly dumb ideas, and sure they have the burden to produce evidence and also the burden to persuade that their evidence supports their points, and we already know that a lot of times they do not bring very good facts and/or arguments, and bitcoin's ongoing growth and performance largely negates their overall points even if from time to time, they might be providing some concerns that are worthy to address.  

In other words, it seems to me that everyone has a right to participate and even to bring some lame game facts and arguments to the table, but we should not allow those lame game facts and arguments to distract us from understanding and appreciating what is more likely going on presently and how the future seems to be more likely to play out.

So for example the dipwit trolls and bitcoin naysayers (or shitcoin pumpers or fiat pumpers) frequently want to get caught up on what about this and what about this and what about that., and sure sometimes they make decent points, but frequently they bring up pie in the sky bullshit that is very detached from reality and they want to present a 1% or 10% scenario as if it were a 95% scenario.  So sure, we may well want to consider the various 1% or 10% scenarios, but not be giving them way more weight and/or attention than they deserve, unless the dipwit trolls can actually show us that the thing deserves more weight and attention.. so the burden is on them to present evidence and arguments to show those outlier scenarios in terms of having more weight than we had considered them to have... and sure there is no problem with giving them some attention, but we can also tell them to fuck off with their nonsense because I would rather be focusing attention on this thing that has a 60% scenario rather than the various lame 1% scenarios.

When holding your own keys the important thing is to get it right, there is some time window someone can afford to take their time to learn these things and leave them on 3rd parties. In the initial stages, how much Bitcoin was bought can also be a factor, because if a newbie starts out with lets say 200$, then it makes little sense to get a hardware wallet that might cost something in the range of 150$. But over the course of dca this ratio will change, and then it will make a lot of sense to get one. Also in the beginning it might be overwhelming to learn about Bitcoin, and to self custody your money for the first time ever, so people might be more comfortable with sticking to something they know. The important thing is to get it right and not lose your keys, than rushing to hold your keys and possibly losing them. And then sure if someone wants to leave a certain % of their holdings onto exchanges, there might be practical reasons to do so. It will probably highly depend on the individual financial situation of El Salvadorians to consider taking self-custody or not. If someone doesnt even have any kind of savings, it might not even make a difference to get something more secure, as there is nothing to lose. But for someone with even as little as 1000$ it might actually make sense, to take self-custody over it, especially in Bitcoin. As it could grow over time and doesnt have the inflation, confiscation, censorship, banking problems of fiat.

Bitcoin might still help them build any kind of wealth as they can get access to payments that are not controlled by central entities. Oftentimes in countries with high degrees of emigration, people that left might want to send their family and friends some remittances, but most of it will be eaten by banks, governments or smugglers. This is a huge barrier that was almost impossible to overcome, and still is in countries where Bitcoin education is lacking. The problem is getting this knowledge to people that barely have access/ knowledge about technology and live in hostile/ controlled environments, just making Bitcoin legal tender makes this whole process a whole lot easier and safer already. And could help some people out of poverty in the long term.

We saw this all the time with even older hodlers who just forgot they had some significant amount of Bitcoin on hard drives and didnt take any care of backing it up and then losing it. As Bitcoin grows in price, people can afford/ have to take greater security measures to save them.


There is some kind of balance between the two. If someone is completely dependent on centralized services the tyranny starts, but in a healthy environment, where people took care of having enough access to decentralized services, centralized services would simply start to get abandoned if they tried some iffy things and only the good ones would survive, if people decide to only use them. There will probably always remain some kind of demand for some centralized services, for various reasons, or simply because many people dont realize the difference decentralization makes until its too late. The important thing is that we have enough decentralized services in use for people to have secure alternatives where its possible.

Good point, it kinda defeats the fud that Nayib Bukele is only trying to get investments from the outside into El Salvador, that was brought up by people. The shitcoin world would be happy to pump a lot more resources into a country, that they could make their playground, as they have billions in backings from VCs. And they could play into the trendy narrative that shitcoins are so much more energy friendly etc. But we see this is not happening, which makes these accusations look ridiculous again, any country wants investments, but this is obviously not a scheme to maximise money being brought into the country, as shitcoinery would bring in a lot more and be easier than just sticking to Bitcoin.


True.

El Salvador has adopted bitcoin and it became legal tender in their country now the country has invested heavily in bitcoin at the price of $19,000 with yesterday's tweet by Nayib Bukele, of course El Salvador will have a lot of support with this adoption of bitcoin, on top of also Bitfinex donate Bitcoin and USDT to El Salvador as a form of support.

But now the African country is getting closer to the adoption of bitcoin which will become a legal tender, I can only see from this tweet.


https://twitter.com/SydneyIfergan/status/1523351765910888448

Here are some countries that legalize investing in Bitcoin.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/041515/countries-where-bitcoin-legal-illegal.asp

Edit:
Bitcoin Legal Tender in Central African Republic

Amid the criticism about the volatility effect of Bitcoin on the El Salvador economy since its adoption sometime last year, some level of development has taken place in the small American countries like Bitcoin city and the volcano development that will power several other crypto related industry activities and in no time I believe country will build their own mining farm.

El Salvador is open to many advantages in the crypto industry since the country is first to have taken the move to make Bitcoina legal tender, atlist that will give both the government and the citizens the chance to develop that sector to improve the economy.

For me, that's good news. He is a leader who anticipates the future. It will benefit hugely their nation's economy as well.

I simply wish the leaders of other nations would take the same course of action. The crypto community will become more robust and large as a result.

yep.. fuck shitcoins and their ongoing perversion of the ideas behind bitcoin.. even though surely it would be nice if some of the countries figure out some bitcoin-focused ways to make some proposals that might be somehow similar to what El Salvador is doing.. and sure, no two countries are going to likely to every single thing alike.. even though so far El Salvador is providing a decent model - and maybe even some areas to attempt to learn from and/or improve upon in future iterations..

Mistakes are always going to be made, yet part of the challenge will be how to either learn from the mistakes and/or to figure out how much effort should be put into avoiding mistakes.

In the one interview with Bukele (with Peter McCormick) that I referenced earlier in this thread, there were some instances in which Bukele was addressing the question of implement now or wait, and for sure, there are advantages to implement now.. and learn along the way.. rather than waiting, waiting and waiting.. and what the fuck gets done with waiting.. It is similar to those no coiners (or low coiners) who are trying to figure out the "perfect" time to get into bitcoin, and many of us who have studied bitcoin know that the perfect time is right away.. as soon as asking the question.. get the fuck in right away.. and then figure out some of the other matters regarding DCA, buying on dips, HODL and even other developing, building, learning matters as you go.. .. so I am not really opposed to the idea of various African countries potentially jumping into the fray of bitcoin and of course, we still get back to foundational principles which seems to be that strong foundational principles are going to focus on bitcoin first. and then maybe down the road 1-2 years (or maybe longer?) to thereafter consider if there might be any advantages to adding any shitcoin projects into the mix (probably not, but even bitcoin-first and bitcoin oriented approaches can still weigh the extent to which allowing shitcoins is not going to screw things up or bring any possible benefits as compared to how many costs that shit tends to have and to likely to leave those matters outside of various governmental/publicly-funded spheres).


Fuck crypto.

El Salvador adopted and implemented a bitcoin ONLY law..   Sure shitcoins follow and try to hang on the coattails, but I doubt that El Salvador (or its public sector leaders, Bukele et al) have any intention to bring strength, largess or "robustness" to shitcoins.


I agree with you Bobrox in terms of how difficult that it might be to actually see any impact on bitcoin price that would come from small countries, or even a bunch of citizens (possibly poor) in pockets of countries becoming more and more bitcoin oriented and building systems around bitcoin, yet at the same time, bitcoin is likely going to be getting more and more strength from the lower level, poor and individual choices and building systems of direct communications and transactions around bitcoin...  So for me, it seems very good to be finding out that bitcoin is spreading more and more to various areas of the world in which the population really likely needs ways to communicate value to one another without having to rely on various forms of debased money or even that many of the population has little to no access to various kinds of banking systems.. so in that regard, bitcoin is likely to be quite empowering for them in terms of providing potential for more value storing, transacting and preserving - and surely many of the citizens and even countries could be helpful to help people to learn how to NOT get overleveraged in bitcoin and/or to be careful about scams and careful about their preserving of their keys or even privacy matters in terms of NOT flaunting their value (or the wealth that they might have been able to accumulate in bitcoin).

This is a tweet from President Nayib Bukele a week ago. This shows how determined is the steps taken forward in making an economy around the bitcoin. Against so many criticism he believe in the growth. This is reflected through the statement Will they publish an apology once we pay everything on time?

I highly doubt whether Bitcoin will become successful in the coming years. The people need to be financially aware first. They need to explore and learn crypto (which would not be an easy task, I think). But at least it has thrown some light of hope on the future of Bitcoin.